Saturday, December 6, 2014

Kevin Fogolin's job is to keep people safe. But in order to do that, he has to cause a little destruction now and then. You see, Kevin is an avalanche controller in the Canadian Rockies. His job is to be out in the snow, to ski, and sometimes he gets to ride in helicopters and drop bombs. Sounds like a pretty cool gig, eh? It is, as long as everything goes as planned. But when things go wrong, they can go really, really wrong...

Dry-tooling is an interesting sport. You're rock climbing, but using ice tools. It sounds easy, right? Well think about it this way: you no longer have 10 fingers and nice, sticky rubber holding you to the rock, instead you have all your weight balanced on 4 pieces of 3-4 mm thick sharpened steel. Angelika Rainier is a master of those steel points, and in our next video she shows us how it's done in the first ascent of KamaSutra, one of the hardest dry-tool lines in Italy at D13+ (about 5.13c/d).

Most of the videos I put here are more fast-paced, get-your-heart-pumping, adrenaline-rush type videos. But every once in a while, I find something that might be a slower-paced on the surface, but stirs something a bit deeper in your soul.

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